A busy rail corridor through northwest Montana was closed over the weekend after a train derailed and spilled hundreds of tons of grain on the southern edge of Glacier National Park. 

On Saturday morning at approximately 5:42 a.m., a westbound BNSF Railway grain train derailed near Bear Creek, about four miles east of Essex. Nobody was injured in the derailment but 12 rail cars went off the tracks, with two sliding down a steep embankment above U.S. Highway 2. BNSF officials told Montana Free Press that the cause of the derailment was under investigation. 

The derailment blocked both main line tracks for hours and forced the closure of BNSF’s busy route between the Midwest and Pacific Northwest. Passengers aboard Amtrak’s Empire Builder, which connects Chicago with Portland and Seattle, had to ride buses between Whitefish and Shelby to get around the derailment. One of the main line tracks was cleared and rebuilt by late Saturday, enabling some rail traffic to resume through the area. The second main line track was expected to reopen by Monday. 

While no hazardous material was spilled in the wreck, the hundreds of tons of grain that did will likely concern wildlife officials in northwest Montana. Grain spilled along Glacier Park from leaking rail cars or derailments has been an issue for decades because when the grain ferments it attracts bears to the railroad right-of-way. 

According to a lawsuit filed earlier this year by two environmental groups, BNSF trains have allegedly “killed or contributed to the deaths” of more than 50 bears between 2008 and 2018, between Shelby and Sandpoint, Idaho. BNSF has been working with wildlife officials to come up with a plan to address the issue, most notably by thoroughly cleaning up derailment sites. On Saturday afternoon, at least two vacuum trucks were spotted at the derailment site ready to begin picking up the spilled grain. 

According to the Federal Railroad Administration, more than 1,000 trains derail every year in the United States.

The post Train derails near Glacier, spills hundreds of tons of grain appeared first on Montana Free Press.

A Montana business owner and supporter of former President Donald Trump has been sentenced to two years in federal prison for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol that interrupted certification of the 2020 Electoral College vote.

Henry Phillip “Hank” Muntzer, 55, of Dillon was also sentenced Thursday to a year of supervised release and ordered to pay $2,000 in restitution.

Muntzer was arrested two weeks after the siege based on social media posts and videos taken inside the Capitol, according to court records.

He was found guilty in February of obstructing an official proceeding and civil disorder, both felonies, following a bench trial before U.S. District Court Judge Jia M. Cobb. Muntzer was also found guilty of four misdemeanor charges. However, the charge of obstructing an official proceeding was dismissed before sentencing because a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in June made it more difficult to prosecute that charge.

Prosecutors presented evidence that Muntzer and a group of friends traveled to Washington to attend the “Stop the Steal” rally. After Trump’s speech at the Ellipse, Muntzer joined the crowd walking to the Capitol, where he spent about 38 minutes inside.

Muntzer was involved in physical confrontations with law enforcement officers near the Senate chamber and in the Capitol Rotunda, resisted law enforcement efforts to get him to leave and was among the last to do so, prosecutors said.

More than 1,500 people have been charged with Capitol riot-related federal crimes. Over 1,000 rioters have been convicted and sentenced. Roughly 650 of them received prison time ranging from a few days to 22 years.

In Dillon, Muntzer is known for a pro-QAnon mural on the building that houses his appliance store, according to the Dillon Tribune. Many QAnon followers believe in baseless conspiracy theories.

The post Montana businessman gets 2 years in prison for role in Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol appeared first on Montana Free Press.

Community support has been overwhelming as the Three Affiliated Tribes battle round-the-clock to contain wildfires raging across northwest North Dakota. 

One of at least six outbreaks over the weekend, the Bear Den Fire near Mandaree remains 20% contained at time of publication. As of early afternoon more than 11,000 acres were actively burning, including significant portions of the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation.

The fire has burned more than 28,000 acres since it began early Saturday, according to the North Dakota Forest Service. They said a priority on Monday was controlling the fires with air support from the National Guard Black Hawk helicopters. 

The Bear Den Fire destroyed two residences and multiple structures but caused no injuries, according to authorities. The Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation’s Emergency Operations Center lifted mandatory evacuation orders for residents of both Four Bears and West reservation segments by Sunday afternoon.

Authorities said a fire located near Ray killed one man, 26-year-old Johannes Nicolaas Van Eeden of South Africa, and left another in critical condition.  

As crews continue battling blazes that began in the early morning hours on Saturday, community members are ensuring hot meals, toiletries and other supplies are available to those coming off long shifts or residents affected by the fires. 

Rancher Howard Fettig was on fire watch near Bear Den Bay when he spoke to Buffalo’s Fire in the late morning on Monday. It’s been “neighbors helping neighbors, both on and off reservation,” he said. 

“I think it’s an eye-opener.” 

Howard Fettig, rancher helping create fire guards north of Mandaree

MHA Nation’s Emergency Operations Center in New Town is requesting donated snacks, coffee, toiletries, and bottled water. Community members at the Emergency Response building in Mandaree welcome donations of brown paper bags to make sack lunches, toilet paper, paper towels, hand soap, kitchen trash bags, coffee, bath towels, and laundry soap. 

Lyda Spotted Bear told Buffalo’s Fire the support staff and fire fighters have been very thankful for the consistent supply of hot meals as they rotate through shifts. A steady flow of local volunteers is providing supplies and delivery, Spotted Bear said.

The fire’s path missed Fettig’s home by just half a mile, razing fences, trees and the pasture where he had planned to graze animals this fall. 

The crisis was nowhere over, he said, as Monday’s southern winds were making flare-ups’ path unpredictable. 

He was one of many farmers and ranchers standing by with tractors to create fire lines –  stretches of tilled soil stopping the spread of flames.

“I think it’s an eye-opener,” Fettig said. He hopes people understand it will happen again and “we need to have a better understanding on how to protect people.” Western North Dakota is in moderate to severe drought with no relief of dry conditions in the near future. 

The Bear Den Fire drew  a coordinated response from the tribes,  U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, North Dakota Forest Service, Department of Emergency Services, Army National Guard and Highway Patrol. 

Dry conditions and high northwest winds – with gusts recorded over 75 miles per hour – pushed fires southeast on Saturday. The exact cause of the fires remains unknown. 

Elkhorn Fire, which has burned more than 20,000 acres south of Watford City, was 20% contained Monday afternoon, with no reported injuries or destroyed residences.

By Sunday evening, emergency responders had almost entirely contained a fire near Arnegard and another by Charlson, the Garrison Fire near Emmet and two fires that merged between Ray and Tioga. Downed power lines have left more than 300 without electricity statewide. 

The post Three Affiliated Tribes emergency responders combat 11,000-acre Bear Den Fire appeared first on Buffalo’s Fire.

At a hearing last week in Rapid City, S.D, a roomful of people offered more than six hours of testimony. Area tribes testified in favor of revoking military Medal of Honor awards to cavalrymen of the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre.

Descendants of massacre victims and survivors answered an invitation from Oglala Sioux Tribal President Frank Star Comes Out to join the hearing on Sept. 18. The live broadcast took place pursuant to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s July order for a review of the 19 Medal of Honor awards.

Robert Anderson, the Interior Department’s principal deputy solicitor, joined review panel chair Tom James in the hearing. Anderson will prepare a report for the Defense Department, which will submit recommendations to President Biden, according to James.

The speakers carried on a century-old pressure campaign to rescind the honors that stem from one of the worst massacres in the country’s Indian Wars. In addition to being descendants of massacre survivors, many witnesses spoke from their perspectives as military veterans. It was the U.S. 7th Cavalry that gunned down over 300 unarmed Lakota men, women, and children after their surrender at Wounded Knee, S.D.

Star Comes Out, a veteran, argued the medals violated military rules of engagement, as the soldiers killed unarmed civilians. “I don’t see any honor in that… They should be court martialed instead of honored,” he said.

Cheyenne River Sioux Tribal Chairman Ryman LeBeau highlighted the intergenerational trauma the massacre has inflicted on the Lakota people. “My grandmother would say, ‘There’s a pervasive sadness throughout our people.’ And I believe she was talking about that historical trauma that we all carry.” His grandmother Marcella LeBeau served as a World War II nurse and fought for revocation of the medals until her death at 102.

“The White Buffalo Calf Woman came to give us a message… This is a prophecy she sent me to tell you—that you will get these awards rescinded.”

Cheryl Dupris, retired paratrooper and sister of Arvol Looking Horse

Cheyenne River Sioux citizen Manny Iron Hawk spoke of losing his grandfather, uncle and other relatives during the massacre on the Pine Ridge Reservation. A high school teacher, he recounted his grandmother’s harrowing account of her survival. Growing up with such stories he and others said the emotional and psychological impact passed down over the years.

“We talk about trauma in the DNA, and that transferred to me—but I want to stop that,” he said. “This issue is our fight today. We need to finish it. We don’t want to pass it on to our children and grandchildren. We descendants look at this as a medicine way.”

Iron Hawk received cheers for telling officials,”You have the authority to make this right. Either revoke all the medals, or don’t revoke them at all.”

“We talk about trauma in the DNA, and that transferred to me—but I want to stop that.”

Wounded Knee Descendant Manny Iron Hawk

Janet Alkire, the first woman elected to chair the Standing Rock Tribe, linked the massacre to the prior killing of Chief Sitting Bull. She said, “Had Sitting Bull not been arrested, Wounded Knee would never have happened.”

When Minneconjou Chief Spotted Elk, known to the settlers as Big Foot, learned of Sitting Bull’s assassination, he knew there would be trouble, as Dee Brown relates in “Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee.” He gathered his band and headed toward Pine Ridge. En route the 7th Cavalry intercepted them, escorted them to the place where they camped along Wounded Knee Creek. It was there the following morning that the massacre occurred.

An Air Force veteran who served in both Desert Shield and Desert Storm, Alkire said, “Medals are for valor and bravery.” The soldiers at Wounded Knee “did not demonstrate that. It’s like a slap in the face, too, because you don’t kill women and children,” she said.

Cedric Broken Nose, a descendant of Wounded Knee survivors, shared his family’s painful history, including how his great-grandfather had instructed relatives to keep mum about it. “Do not tell the story,” Broken Nose paraphrased. “Otherwise, the United States government is going to find you and do the same thing to you, too – to eliminate you.”

Cheryl Dupris, retired paratrooper of the Army’s 82nd Airborne, brought a prophecy to the hearing. She is a sister of Arvol Looking Horse, who is the designated carrier of the Great Sioux Nation’s White Buffalo Calf Woman’s sacred bundle.

“The White Buffalo Calf Woman came to give us a message to the Miniconjou,” she said. “She told us the prophecy of the military coming, the white men coming, the invaders. But this is a prophecy she sent me to tell you—that you will get these awards rescinded.”

Sicangu Lakota grandmother and water protector Cheryl Angel was among several witnesses who noted the troops at Standing Rock and Wounded Knee were acting outside their jurisdiction. They should not have deployed after the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty that reserved the territory for the Seven Council Fires of the Great Sioux Nation.

The treaties signed between Native nations and the U.S. government were supposed to uphold the welfare of her people, she said. “We signed treaties and were massacred even as we honored them,” she said. “Because we agreed to live in peace. Now give that to us,” she said.

“My relatives, it’s been over a hundred years,” said Angel. “Start somewhere. Rescind those medals, now, Biden. It’s a good time to start.”

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” width=”224″ height=”168″ align=”right” hspace=”10″ alt=”The future of grizzlies hangs in the balance as FWS weighs delisting” title=”The future of grizzlies hangs in the balance as FWS weighs delisting” />State Fish, Wildlife and Parks has released its final EIS proposing a statewide grizzly management plan.

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” width=”224″ height=”168″ align=”right” hspace=”10″ alt=”A cow and bull moose in Grand Teton National Park” title=”A cow and bull moose in Grand Teton National Park” />The state Game and Fish
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Editor’s note: This article was produced with support from the Education Writers Association Reporting Fellowship program.

In a state full of rural, tucked away corners, Lincoln County is one of Montana’s most rural and tucked away.

The county of 20,000 people is located in the state’s far northwest corner, bordering Canada and Idaho’s panhandle. Its communities are dotted around the Kootenai National Forest, whose 2.2 million acres of firs, pines, spruces and towering mountains define the craggy landscape.

Libby, the county seat of 3,100 residents, is 69 miles from Eureka, the county’s second-biggest city of 1,500 residents.

Lincoln County is rural and rugged, forged by industry and ecology and steeped in a complicated history of extraction, exploitation and economic struggle. It is a place where everyone knows someone who knows your cousin — a place where the future is still being dug out of the past. 

Related: Interested in innovations in the field of higher education? Subscribe to our free biweekly Higher Education newsletter.

Montana’s changing economy is palpable in Lincoln County, where formidable mills and mines once powered its small towns. The area used to be a historic powerhouse of timber and vermiculite production before shifts in the natural resource economy in the 1990s and 2000s marked the closure of nearly every local timber plant and Libby’s vermiculite mine, leaving thousands unemployed.

At the vermiculite mine, workers for decades were exposed to deadly asbestos fibers that killed hundreds, and trains carrying asbestos products blew toxic chemicals across town. As of 2021, 694 Libby residents had died of asbestos related diseases. The mine’s owner, the W.R. Grace Company, kept workers in the dark about the dangers of asbestos exposure.

It is under the shadow of the shuttered mills and mines that Lincoln County is forging ahead, crafting a future that community leaders hope will honor its history while breaking free from its dependence on extractive industries. At the center of that future is a local community college, which is helping Lincoln County residents adapt to a brave new world, building careers close to home and granting them a once elusive future in the community that raised them.

It’s a future that, according to Megan Rayome, the director of the college, is built on the premise that Lincoln County “hasn’t been left to die.”

“It was almost like a guaranteed job,” Kathy Ness, executive director of the Eureka Chamber of Commerce, said of the logging industry in Lincoln County.

On an early summer day in the small town, Ness recounted her own journey to Eureka. 

Ness “married in” to Eureka, settling in the town with her husband who was raised there. She’s been in Eureka for 45 years, a period during which she watched the economy ebb and flow, including her husband’s now long gone career as a logger. Her children and grandchildren have largely left home, seeking jobs in bigger markets. While they’d like to come home, “There’s not a lot in Eureka,” Ness said.

After decades of strong timber markets in Montana, a confluence of local and global factors began to slow the industry’s production in Lincoln County. Overharvesting led to a downturn in timber availability on National Forest land. Economic uncertainty in the 1990s and 2000s forced fluctuations in demand. Environmental litigation shut down operations. Four mills in Lincoln County shut down between 1993 and 2005, leaving more than 500 residents without work.

Following the closure of Libby’s vermiculite mine in 1991, the county’s unemployment rate reached 29%. A decade later, after Libby’s Stimson Lumber Mill closed in 2002, unemployment hit 15.8%.

“It was very damaging to the overall psyche,” Rayome, who grew up in Libby, said.

Related: Is the secret to getting rural kids to college leveraging the entire community?

Rayome is the director of Flathead Valley Community College’s (FVCC) Lincoln County Campus (LCC). LCC is a satellite campus of FVCC, which for four decades has offered career training and college courses to local students. It’s a small campus, boasting seven employees who work in its sole building near downtown Libby.

As a kid, Rayome remembers when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency set up shop in Libby in the late 1990s, tearing up lawns and attics in order to remove toxic asbestos. She remembers her father, a former miner, attending classes at LCC to learn computer skills in hopes of building a new career. She sometimes attended classes with him when he couldn’t find childcare.

Rayome also remembers moving to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, during her youth so that her mother could pursue a degree in nursing. While critical for her mother’s career, the move was disruptive for Rayome, who had known nothing but Libby her entire life.

“I did not enjoy that my mom moved me from my childhood home,” she said. “It’s a small town where you have the same friends and your family is all there. It was difficult for us, in a lot of different ways, for our family.”

Rayome finished high school in Idaho, then moved to Arizona for college, where she earned her bachelor’s and law degrees from Arizona State University.

While in Arizona, Rayome read about how people from rural communities who sought advanced degrees were often forced to leave home to do so, many never returning. The phenomenon, often called rural “brain drain,” stuck with her. She knew she needed to go back to Lincoln County.

After law school, Rayome returned to Libby to practice law. When LCC needed a director in 2020, she jumped at the opportunity.

Lincoln County’s first college program was born in 1979, after a group of local stakeholders identified a need for a college-level course in supervisory and management skills to meet industry needs. The coalition of local residents partnered with FVCC in Kalispell to bring a supervisory management certificate to Libby the next year. It proved so successful that the Libby Chamber of Commerce formed a committee to investigate expanding higher education.

Four years later, FVCC and the county reached an agreement to open a satellite campus in Libby. LCC classes were initially held in local high schools before the college found a home in an old school building on Mineral Avenue.

By 1987, the campus enrolled 73 full-time students, ranging from teenagers to middle-aged mothers heading back to work. According to local reporting, the campus’ “bread and butter” was non-traditional college students, including those who were looking for job changes, facing career-altering injuries or rebounding from layoffs. By 1994, enrollment had risen to 150 students.

A financial dispute between LCC and FVCC’s main campus in Kalispell nearly severed the colleges’ ties in the late 1990s, but the campuses were able to make amends.

In 2002, LCC moved to its current building, which was formerly occupied by the U.S. Forest Service.

“For the first time in the history of the LCC, we will take on the image of being a viable college in Libby and Lincoln County,” interim director George Gerard told the Daily Inter Lake at the time of the move.

Related: Rural universities, already few and far between, are being stripped of majors

LCC Director Pat Pezzelle in 2004 made local headlines after appearing at a board meeting virtually — a rarity at the time — through the campus’s first interactive, video teleconferencing (ITV) equipment. The distance learning classroom further expanded access for rural students. It was acquired through a $350,000 grant championed by then-U.S. Sen. Conrad Burns. 

According to college leaders, LCC’s success has been grounded in a collective impact framework that designs programs from the ground up, rather than the top down. It’s a model that responds directly to industry needs, carving out degree programs with local relevance and, for graduates, long-term economic benefits. 

After the Stimson Timber layoffs in 2002, college leaders vowed to retrain Libby’s nearly 300 displaced workers.

“We have to figure out what kind of training we can provide to make these people employable,” LCC instructor and advisor Chad Shilling said at a staff meeting after the closure, according to newspaper archives. “I don’t know if they’re going to be here for the long-term commitment, but we’re going to be here to take care of their immediate needs the best we can.”

FVCC President Jane Karas said she has “lots of those kinds of stories” about locals who showed up at the college’s door jobless and left with a new career. 

Karas described one student who, before being laid off by the Owens and Hurst Mill in Eureka in the mid-2000s, had “never done anything but run logs through this mill.” After enrolling in FVCC, he completed a degree in computer science and went to work in IT. 

In 2011, the college trained its first batch of welders through a 10-week program that catered to workers who had been laid off from mining and timber jobs. The program was designed to place workers at Stinger Welding, an Arizona-based bridge building company that brought 70 jobs to Libby before its closure in 2013.

When Kalispell-based Nomad Global Communication Solutions (GCS) announced its expansion into Libby in 2022, the need for welders and machinists grew. LCC worked with the local school district to launch an evening welding class at Libby High School. In its first class, the college filled seven of eight welding booths with eager learners from all walks of life.

Through the Running Start dual enrollment program, eight Libby High School students this spring passed their 3G 3/8 Welding Qualification in a college-level course. Many said they plan to expand their skills next year in pursuit of the 6G test. 

With their welding certification, Karas said, students are filling the need for skilled workers that new industry has brought to Lincoln County.

“We focus on how to be most cost-effective, support our community and meet the needs of our students and our employers,” Karas said. 

“What the college did, that is extremely important in terms of working with smaller rural communities, is to go out and establish a relationship,” Lisa Blank, executive director of workforce development for FVCC, said. “Not waiting for them to come to you, but you going out to them.”

Blank acts as the conduit between FVCC, businesses, the Montana Department of Labor and Industry, public schools and students, all of whom have a vested interest in the college’s career programs. Her job was created specifically to streamline communication between those stakeholders.

“There were lots of things going on on campus — great opportunities — but they weren’t necessarily synergistic or integrated,” Blank said. “One of the tasks that this position was given was to come up with a way to integrate the effort so that we can better leverage it for the use of students.”

Related: ‘We’re from the university and we’re here to help’

Blank sought out grants to expand LCC’s capacity in welding, commercial driving and Computer Numerical Control (CNC) machining following the expansions of Nomad GCS and Alpine Precision into Lincoln County. She helped to create a fully online land surveying program, which will begin this fall. She worked with the Montana Logging Association to buy a $100,000 state-of-the-art forestry simulator to prepare students for jobs in logging.

Blank says the college is the “linchpin” that holds together stakeholders in Lincoln County, but that it is not alone. Blank works closely with the Libby School District, Libby Job Service, the Department of Labor and companies in fields from healthcare to heavy machining.

“Everyone needs to be at the table,” she said. 

For Rayome and LCC administrators, the college’s work goes beyond developing hard skills. It is an institution that breaks down many of the barriers to higher education faced by rural students. 

“Being rural is hard,” said Tabitha Viergutz, a longtime Libby resident and the local community officer for the LOR Foundation, a community development fund that works in small towns across the West.

Sitting in a combined coffee shop and carpet store in downtown Libby, Viergutz described her own arc at the college, one that brought her to her current work in the community. 

Viergutz moved to Libby 13 years ago as a nail technician. Unable to get her esthetician business off the ground, she struggled to feed her family. She decided to enroll in LCC with the goal of earning an associates degree in social work. While at the college, she took a combination of in-person and virtual classes through the ITV system, which she described as “amazing.” When LOR needed a local leader to run its Libby branch, mentors from the college tapped Viergutz. 

“I wouldn’t have gone back to college had LCC not been here,” she said. 

Viergutz’s story is common in Libby. A young mother, the idea of moving to Missoula or Kalispell for college was out of the question. The cost of full-time enrollment was daunting. So, too, was the idea of becoming a non-traditional student in a traditional classroom setting. 

Before financial aid — which, FVCC officials note, there is plenty of — a full semester of tuition and fees for an in-district student at LCC costs $2,810. Comparatively, an in-state resident at the University of Montana in the same semester will pay $4,273. At Carroll College, a private university in Helena, a semester costs $20,066 before aid. 

“When you become a resident of a small, rural area, that’s where your heart lies,” she said. “The idea of going to a large college just isn’t in the cards.”

Jayne Downey, director of the Center for Research on Rural Education at Montana State University, said that beyond being smaller and more affordable, rural colleges like LCC are able to draw on the “unique strengths and assets” of their small towns, building curriculum and preparing students for careers in a way that is rooted in specific community needs. 

“These smaller graduating classes, everybody knows everybody. You are known. You are cared for. Your academic needs can be addressed individually,” she said. “The places where our schools are situated — the communities are a wealth of knowledge and resources, of history and culture, of science and technology. It surrounds them.”

Viergutz is an unofficial spokesperson for the new Libby. She said the town is “changing our focus to what we have versus what we lost.”

Libby’s first brewery, Cabinet Mountain Brewing Company, just celebrated its 10th anniversary. A kickboxing studio came to town last fall. In the new Kootenai Business Park, a former Stimson Lumber facility, there’s a pickleball court and a large Nomad GCS office. Dollar General is now in Libby and Eureka. 

“I think that Libby is still very much ingrained in our history, and very much would love to see those industries come back,” Viergutz said of mining and timber. Yet, she added, there’s “a forward facing view on reality.” 

Rayome said Nomad GCS’s arrival in town “increased the upward spiral of hope.” 

“We’re seeing people not just coming in to ogle at our sadness,” Rayome said. 

Blank, FVCC’s workforce development director, said the future of LCC’s success lies not just in training workers, but in developing local leaders who can spearhead programs and help recruit a next generation. Cultivating homegrown leadership is part of the community resilience model that Blank bases her work off of. 

“We want to build leadership in these communities,” she said. “They know what they need most, and they will always know better because they live there.”

In the future, Rayome hopes to open a dedicated building at LCC for hands-on trades education. She wants to invest in new technology, revamping the college’s ITV infrastructure. Like Blank, she wants to continue to foster leaders who were born and raised in Libby — those who want to help the town move into the future. As more jobs arrive, so too will demand for restaurants, healthcare facilities, homes, schools and the workers who power them. It’s all part of the “upward spiral of hope” that she described. Though it will be challenging, Rayome said, Lincoln County will adapt to a new economic future.

“They’re doers. They believe in themselves,” she said of Libby. “It’s a community of survivors.”

The post A community college promises a rural county it ‘hasn’t been left to die’ appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

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